Details of CBE pay hikes follow secret meeting

Trevor Howell and Matt McClure, Calgary Herald07.11.2013

The Calgary Board of Education met in secret in March to allocate $1.5 million to increase pay for top executives, mid-level managers and other exempt staff while it grappled with lower-than-expected provincial funding.

The city’s public school board quietly posted a report on its website late last month that details a controversial pay hike for senior staff — a move made two days before the school year ended and one week after the board was legally required to release the document.

The report reveals that trustees with the Calgary Board of Education met in secret in March to allocate $1.5 million to increase pay for top executives, mid-level managers and other exempt staff while it grappled with lower-than-expected provincial funding.

Based on a survey of other Calgary employers done by a human resource consulting company, the report called for an average increase to the salary grids for 220 non-unionized staff of about six per cent.

But some positions saw salaries hiked by 22 per cent over 2011 levels.

For example, an area director position can now earn a maximum $205,156, up from $167,500 two years ago.

The chief superintendent can now take home as much as $311,300, up from the previous maximum of $300,000. That figure does not include vehicle and other allowances normally provided to the board’s top bureaucrat.

The new salary ranges will “enable the CBE to be more competitive within the Calgary labour market” by allowing the board to “attract and retain the highest quality exempt employees,” the report said.

Keith Peterson, human resources director for the CBE, apologized for the delay in releasing the report, adding it took the school board months to determine how much of the $1.5 million would ultimately be spent.

“We didn’t know that number until mid-June when the process concluded,” Peterson said in an interview with the Herald.

But Sheila Taylor, one of two school trustees who voted against the report and fought in vain to have it debated in public, said the pay hike and attempts by the CBE to withhold the report send a terrible message to taxpayers.

“Bottom line, it was a bad decision, and now we’re seeing a report that was supposed to be made public be unreasonably delayed,” Taylor said.

The size of the salary hikes for senior staff, she added, is concerning “at a time when class sizes are increasing and high schools are being cut 11 per cent.”

Trustees approved the release of the report on April 23 after details of the pay raises leaked to the media, but Taylor suggested the full document was kept under wraps until the school year was nearly over and public board meetings had wrapped up for the summer.

“The board approved this being released months ago,” Taylor said. “So the question remains: Why did it take months for a report that is of great interest to the public to be released?”

The Calgary Herald filed an access to information request on April 18. That request was declined, in part, because the CBE said it would release the report within 60 days of the request, June 18. The CBE posted the report on its website on June 25.

In an internal July 10 email, obtained by the Herald, the CBE’s chief communications officer, Richard Peter, tells trustees and superintendents that the report was posted that day “according to a pre-set plan.”

Veronica Chodak, an officer with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, said the CBE ought to have publicly released the report within 60 days of the when it received the Herald’s request.

Chodak said the law also required the school board to inform the newspaper when it posted the document online.

“That’s something we could definitely investigate,” Chodak said. “There could be a finding the legislation was breached and an order issued that would hopefully encourage better compliance in future.”

Scott Hennig, vice-president of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said the provincial government needs to amend Alberta’s freedom of information legislation to impose fines or other sanctions on public bodies that fail to release information as required.

“There ought to be some repercussions,” Henning said.

He said Alberta needs a sunshine law like other provinces that would require salary and benefit payment disclosure for all public officials who earn more than $100,000.

“There might be good justification for raising executive salaries to attract and retain the best,” said Hennig, “but the way this board is behaving, it’s quite clear they don’t believe they can justify these pay hikes.”

When news broke in March that the CBE had set aside cash for pay raises to its top executives after the province had requested school boards cut their administrative overhead, Education Minister Jeff Johnson said he couldn’t “believe anybody would be that stupid.”

Johnson was unavailable for comment for an interview Wednesday about the report, but his press secretary said the CBE had also refused to release the salary report to the provincial government in March.

“We were told that it would be made public and that we would get a copy of it,” said Kim Capstick.

Capstick said the minister tasked a group of MLAs to work on new regulations in support of the Education Act, including examining what rules need to be in place to ensure there was the appropriate level of financial transparency among school boards.

“A huge, huge amount of Alberta taxpayer dollars is going to these school boards; $7 billion is being spent in education this year,” Capstick said, “and we want to make sure that while we fully respect the local autonomy of locally elected school boards, we feel it is the responsibility of the province to make sure that taxpayers in Alberta understand how it’s being spent.”

Peter’s internal memo indicates that only $829,000 of the allocated $1.5 million, roughly 55 per cent, will actually be added to the base salaries paid to exempt staff in 2013 and coming years.

“We can anticipate negative coverage,” reads the missive, “mitigated by the amount spent and worsened by the time it has taken us to release (the report).”

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